Hassan and Hocine might not speak English, but the 26-year-old Algerian twins know exactly what Priti Patel’s plans are for the thousands of migrants like them looking to cross the Channel into the UK from their camp in France.
“[Rwanda] won’t stop us, we want to come [to the UK] anyway,” the brothers tell me via a French translator from a day centre in Calais, where they’ve been living in a small tent for the last six weeks. They are referring to a news story that’s been making its way around smartphones in the camp since mid-April: that the British government plans to fly Channel migrants 4,000 miles from the UK to Rwanda, in an Australia-style bid to halt illegal crossings.
